“I will stand on my ground as an atheist until your god shows up...If my irreligious bothers you much, and if you think everything I do is heresy to your god I don't care. Heresy is for those who believe, I don't. So, it isn't heresy at all!

I did call 'em out on it, waiting for a follow-up reply. Seems that the current management aren't aware that one of the 'core devs' links to a phpBB forum in their signature, which hardly seems like an appropriate behaviour, and if anything worse than I'm doing.

Yes, I'm well aware of the SMF-Friends saga, only too acutely. Which is why I removed it in the first instance and then challenged it, so that they have absolutely no grounds to claim that I'm being unreasonable about it.

Apparently, there's a rule that no links to other forum packages - the example given was MyBB - in signatures and would I remove the Wedge image from my sm.org sig.

Why? Is it too ugly for them? :P

Who asked you to remove it?

Anyway...- As mentioned above, SMF is freeware, so why would they care.- They're going BSD, so there should be no ego issues.- We haven't launched a big campaign on their boards. They can't accuse us of being spammers.- Every single link that has Wedge.org in it is justified -- by the 44.000 times Pete helped someone selflessly on THEIR boards, doing support for THEM.- They can't say anything about Wedge (because it'll be legal once it's released), or the Wedge.org website (because it's perfectly in line with everything.)- Last time they banned people for posting links for smf-friends, let's just say that didn't help their popularity at all, and they ended up restoring the accounts. Do they want to go through that AGAIN?

And on a philosophical level --- they should take responsibility for Wedge. They helped create it, they can't hide it. If they had behaved properly with Pete and I last year, we wouldn't have felt compelled to take the project in our own hands. We would be SMF team leaders at this point and taking the right decisions for the software. But because this didn't happen, this is now happening in Wedge. They could avoid this by simply going back in time, breaking the space-time continuum and creating a "what if?" alternative universe where they didn't piss everyone off by acting like jerks with people who actually cared about the software more than they did.

Because time travel is not available in our current dimension (unless I missed its invention during the time we worked on Wedge), all they can do now is take responsibility. That means, accepting that Wedge is here to stay, and not just a passing fad in Nao's and Arantor's minds. We've been in the SMF community for many years, extremely active, and we've done a great job at helping SMF's reputation and success (Pete with SimpleDesk and his incredible amount of support, me with Aeva and SMG / Aeva Media). They should know better: when we have something in mind, we won't rest until it's done. We told them back in August 2010 that we started working on a fork. We reminded them in November that we were still actively working on it. We waited for another 5 months before going public. I don't think anyone in the SMF team could possibly find a *believable* way of complaining about any of our actions. They put themselves into this situation. They can fight back by working really hard on SMF 3.0 and releasing it real soon. Any other way of fighting back would be unfair and disloyal, and would be seen as such by the community.

We're not here to kill SMF. On the contrary, we're here to prevent the SMF team from killing the actual fantastic software that they're sleeping on.

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I have just replied asking whether it's appropriate for team members to be linking to phpBB forums and will await the reply with interest.

Feel free to reuse any of my arguments.

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EDIT: Did I mention that I'd never heard of this rule before now?

"The librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptiously looked very hard for one." (Discworld)

I'm sure that's not because they just came up with it! I mean, they knew about Wedge for so long, they probably devised a rule against it in the meantime! They just need to find WHERE they discussed it publicly! (Or quietly move their discussion to the public area! Or edit an old post to add this rule and hide the edit date! I'm too kind, I shouldn't be helping them.)

"If you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you." (Discworld)

Okay, I'm reading too much Pratchett these days...

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EDIT 2: Wait until I point out a few things of interest, such as the fact that it violates their Core Values. This is going to be hilarious.

We're not competitors... We use SMF as our platform (look at the footer here), we discuss SMF and we certainly won't try to "steal" market shares. (More users = more support requests... And since we'd rather do without monetizing anything, the less users the better for me.)

Also, can we be competitors when we have nothing to offer right now except for dreams...?What they don't like, is that we're putting our fingers where it hurts: that they have not done much in the time since we left the team.I'm not blaming them for not working as much as we do -- after all, working on it fulltime was *my* decision and not a sacrifice many people can affort to make. But heck! They have so little to fix before they can go gold!

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Who asked you to remove it?

Oldiesmann.

I'm afraid I only remember him by name. Is he friendly and sensible, or not?

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I got lots of that packet heat-in-the-microwave popcorn at the ready so it'll be juuuuust right when it's done.

Planning ahead of time is one of our mutual qualities!

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I don't have a problem with rules that are reasonable and fairly enforced. This seems to me to be neither, but they're going to have to do the work to justify it.

So, let's say they pass their "law"... What now? Do they also forbid competitor links inside posts? If they don't, then I'm sure you'll find a good reason to post a link to Wedge in every single of your replies :P

Trying to stick their heads in the sand is no solution to THEIR problems. (I know it's a good solution to my real life problems but let's not change subject :niark:)